The 5-step method to calm yourself down

I like relaxation mechanisms for when you face a moment of intense stress/confusion/frustration. I really like JE's 5-step method for calming yourself down when something happens that sets you atwitter. It's fairly similar to what I do, but more rigorous and more results-oriented.

Anonymity: Busted

It looks like I Don't Wear Skinny Jeans' anonymity has been busted... or slowly leeched out. He did give the little detail of exactly which law school he goes to, and from there it must be pretty easy for the blogosphere to identify you. Especially when so many people read you (clearly not a problem for me).

The Isle of Skye, Scotland: A Photo Essay

The Isle of Skye is AMAZING.

Skye spits waterfalls...

...farts rainbows...

...and generally craps awesomeness.

Judgment for the Plaintiff in the Amount of One Career

See previous post if you are confused about place and person names.

On the train to Edinburgh (pronounce it ed-in-brrrrrrra; roll the ‘r’).

My husband (who needs a name in this drama-tragedy, so from now on he will be called The Economist) and I are going to spend a few days in Scotland on the Isle of Skye. We have gone to Scotland every summer since we have lived in Britain (except the first, but that’s a story for another time); we absolutely love it—if I could live anywhere in the world I would live in the northern Highlands. The landscape is so beautiful, rugged and spectacular as to make you doubt your eyes. In the summer the sun stays out until 11:30 at night. It is not overly warm and you have to have clear weather to really get the full enjoyment of it, but we have always been lucky in that respect. Plus, when we come to Scotland, it is always to go walking (or hiking as we might say in the US) and the cooler weather is ideally suited for strenuous outdoor activity. We are also very fond of Edinburgh (whence came many illustrious personages including Adam Smith and J.K. Rowling). It is out of the way, calm and relaxed, unlike London, yet still very cosmopolitan.

This year, we are taking the train to Edinburgh and renting a car to drive to Skye. Our route will take us through the extraordinary region of Glen Coe, along the western coast and across to the western isles. We rented a cottage on Skye and we’ll use that as a base for walking trips during the days, augmented with time for reading and relaxation. In addition, probably a good amount of time will be spent in the local pubs watching World Cup action.

I love a long train trip dearly and I will miss these times when we’re back in the US.

Still, there are other reasons to look forward to it. Now that I have been accepted to law school, I have gone from Total Failure to ambitious go-getter overnight. I return home in semi-triumph.

I do recognise that my life is about to change in significant ways. (For one, I have to stop using British spellings for everything.) I am moving back to the town where I grew up and where I went to college. I have deeply missed it in the times when England was kicking my butt. I wanted nothing more than to get into law school at The University of Pomorum and immerse myself in law study without the distractions of a big city. Now that it has happened, I’ve discovered the truth in the adage ‘Be careful what you wish for’.

There are so many good things about this situation. I’m going to a well-regarded, 1^st tier law school, paying in-state tuition. I will be living at my in-law’s house (they will not be living there during this time) so I will not be paying rent, not to mention that it is a really nice house. I will have a dishwasher (live in Britain for 4 years and you will be left in no doubt of how much a dishwasher adds to your quality of life). The combination of in-state tuition and not paying rent will mean that I will graduate with much less debt than most people and will therefore have more options when I graduate. Not to mention the amelioration of the burden of repaying the loans. I will, as I said, be able to immerse myself in the study of law without the distractions of big city life. This includes the fact that I will no longer have an outrageous commute to get anywhere—one of the prime benefits of small-town life. I will have a car (or at least access to one) which means greater independence, always a good thing. This being my hometown, I will have no learning curves when it comes to orientation. I know exactly where to go, where to shop, where to get books, where to get coffee, where to go to the gym, what traffic is like at various times of the day, and any number of other tidbits about living in a town with which my intimacy was forged in infancy. I will also know that access to the law school is hopeless on football Saturdays. I believe that my comfort with the town itself will help me get my feet under me when it comes to studying.

I used to work in the research laboratory of a very famous professor who had repeatedly been given offers from the most prestigious institutions in the country to move his lab there, but he chose to remain in my home state for more than 20 years now because he felt the other places were located in cities which would prove too distracting to his employees. I think there is a lot of sense in that notion (although his employees seemed to get up to a lot of mischief anyway). I hope that in the quiet and the calm tranquility of my hometown, I will be able to focus myself fully on school, achieving perhaps a state of one-ness with the law, absorbing the law, and otherwise learning to love the law with all my meek little heart!

Since this is my hometown and I plan to live here for a while I will also be able to work on the dreaded networking. The fact that you can be helped in your career just because of the people you know is completely distasteful and repellant to me, but apparently, as I am constantly told, it’s the way the world works. So who am I to fight it? (Secretly I’m going to destroy the system from within.)

One more thing: going home means that I can finally use all the wonderful gifts I got from my wedding four years ago which have been sitting in my in-law’s storage room, collecting dust and running out their warranties. My husband and I are the types of people who really enjoy things—not expensive things, not things that demonstrate wealth or status, but things that have sentimental value: that remind us of great trips we’ve taken or that make us think of the friends who gave them to us. Sometimes, like when we are home for Christmas, I like to just go visit my wedding things in the basement, thinking of the day when I will finally be able to use them and start making my own home. That day is coming soon!

Another benefit in my new life is that it will truly feel like life, or at least the next step, rather than a holding pattern, which is how England has felt for the last 2 years. Being a law student makes me feel like an adult—because only serious adults go the law school, right? Right?

You see, I have a 15 year plan which I will elucidate at another time. If I didn’t get into law school this year, it would have thrown my whole plan off. Disaster averted!

So you see, this situation is almost ideal and I know it is exactly what I need to do, what I should do; it is nearly the best possible outcome that was within the realm of possibility for me. But in my state of depression and longing for home, I did not give much thought to some of the downsides.

Unfortunately this does mean that I will not be living in the same place as The Economist.However, we realized some time ago that this was inevitable, considering that we only overlapped in applications on two schools, and neither of us got into either one. A lot of people have advised us that career-oriented couples often have to spend some time apart from each other, especially during grad school. We always viewed it as a last resort, and unfortunately it has come to just that. The good news is that we are only 2 hours’ drive apart which is not bad, considering that the other available option was for The Economist to stay in London and for me to be in the Midwest. We prefer this. We will both have a car and will alternate driving on the weekends. If we’re lucky one or both of us will avoid classes Friday or Monday. It is the best we can do. The Economist has applied to take a 1-bedroom apartment in Cowville, where he is doing his PhD. I am really delighted that I will have a roommate, my husband’s cousin, who is doing her MBA. She is a lovely girl I have always gotten along with and it will be nice to have a roommate.

Another negative to which I had not given much thought is the fact that my home state of Pomorum gets damn cold in the winter. Having lived in the highly temperate Britain for four winters, I’m scared I have become a real wimp about the cold. It troubles me because I am a Midwestern girl with cold, ice, snow, rain, tornadoes, humidity, thunderstorms and heat in my bones and I’m worried I’ve gone soft. I always love the bracing cold and the snow when I go home for Christmas, but I’ve only had it in small doses for the last four years. What will it be like to have months of it on end? Now that I’ll be living in a house, will I be expected to shovel snow?!!? This horrifies me, I always hated shoveling snow.

Plus, I’ve always found British winters to be much worse than Pomorum winters. In the UK, it never gets below freezing, so although it’s cold you never get snow. It’s just cold rain.Consequently, everything feels cold and clammy and wet rather than bone-chilling but dry. Plus, in the UK, you can go weeks without seeing a single ray of sunshine. Between the grey of the sky and the grey of the wet concrete, it can be pretty depressing. In Pomorum you get clear skies even in the winter with a layer of snow that reflects light all around and is, frankly, beautiful. I am counting on those sunny days to sustain me in the long cold winter months.

Another semi-con/semi-pro is the fact that we will be closer to our families. I put this in the overall con column because I am feeling wary about this at the moment. We love our families of course but we have really enjoyed our total freedom and independence these last few years. I am someone who particularly prizes liberty and independence, having seen too little of them as a child, and I am concerned what being so near family will do to my sanity.

Finally, I mentioned before that there isn’t much to distract in my hometown. Neither is there much to entertain. I will truly miss the big city arts of London: world-class museums, theatre, music, dance, etc. In my hometown, there isn’t much to do beyond going to the mall, seeing movies, going drinking and going bowling. It is a good study environment but not very exciting.Yet, I seriously doubt this will be a problem as my life will be consumed with school and little else.

So do the pros outweigh the cons in this situation?

Overall my judgment is for the plaintiff. The Isle of Skye notwithstanding, I cannot wait to begin my new life as a University of Pomorum law student.

Glossary of Terms

I need to develop some mechanisms for protecting my anonymity whilst making it easier to write about my experiences. I have decided to replace real names and locations with suitable fictional ones. In the future, people and places will go by the following names:

The Economist

My dear husband. He's got blue eyes, a smoochable mouth, and he is a foot taller than me.

Pomorum City

My hometown. AKA Avalon. AKA The Fortunate Isle.

For example, Geoffrey of Monmouth says the isle

produces all things of it self... Of its own accord it produces grain and grapes, and apple trees grow in its woods from the close-clipped grass. The ground of its own accord produces everything instead of merely grass, and people live there a hundred years or more.

Isidore of Seville says

The name of the Isles of the Fortunate signifies that they bear all good things, as if happy and blessed in the abundance of their fruits.

The University of Pomorum

My law school. Also my undergrad school.

Pomorum

My home state.

Cow College

The Economist's university where he is doing his PhD. Also his undergrad school.

Cowville

Where Cow College is located. It is even lamer than Pomorum City, our hometown.

Resurgam

I am sitting in the Shaw Library at the London School of Economics. It’s one of those old-fashioned grand libraries: a wood paneled room, topped with a glass dome, its walls lined with portraits of former university presidents. Various bookshelves are ranged against the walls, heaving with dusty books, their spines yellowed and tilting behind milky glass. Red upholstered armchairs are clustered around the room. The library is only sparsely populated, most students having finished their exams and decamped, setting up in pubs to relax, drink and watch World Cup. The ones that remain in the library study or write feverishly; some are on Facebook; some are asleep.

I have not experienced the hush rustling quiet of a student library since I finished my master’s degree. I have spent the last two years planning on re-entering academia this fall to begin a law degree. I could just as well have said, ‘to begin my life’. The last four years, since I moved to England, have felt like a long and fruitless detour to the one thing I have wanted to do since I was a junior in college: go to law school and become a lawyer. I bear the most blame for this. The first year, while my husband was in graduate school, I spent temping. It was a job of mindless number crunching and paper pushing. The second year I did my master’s degree. I thought it would help me get into law school. The third I spent doing an internship that, in practical terms, finished four months before I left it. I thought it also would help me get into law school. The eight months since the end of my internship have constituted a long and punishing period of unsuccessful job hunting. I put this down to the recession and consequentially the scarcity of job openings in my field, combined with my lack of substantial work experience. I am classically over-educated and under-experienced. I have been very frustrated and discouraged by this situation but I have taken comfort in the thought that I would enter law school in the fall after which I would have gained some qualities of employability. I was very sanguine about it... until the rejections began pouring in.

In the meantime, my husband was accepted to a PhD program with full funding, a teaching position and a stipend. We planned to move back to the US, something I was so very excited about, until I realized that I was not returning to do anything. I only faced more of the same situation as London: endless fruitless job hunting—only this time it would be more difficult because we would be moving to a much smaller city with fewer job opportunities in my field. A few weeks ago I began submitting applications to various jobs in New York and Washington D.C., where I thought I might have more success. It would require my husband and I to live a substantial distance apart from each other—at least 2 hours by plane—but my husband understands that I can’t spend another year doing nothing of value for my career. Law school? It seems impossible. I have an offer from University College London but feel I don’t want to live in London anymore, much less with my husband halfway across the world. I have been rejected or waitlisted at every US school to which I applied. I have never felt so hopeless and so helpless about my future. I have contemplated giving up on law altogether. I have tried to accept (once again) reduced expectations for my future. I have even contemplated getting pregnant and resigning myself to a life of stay-at-home motherhood simply because I am clearly not smart enough to have a career.

It was around this time that my wonderful (though sometimes meddling) mother-in-law mentioned my situation to some lawyer friends of hers who also happen to work on the Law Faculty of my first choice Midwest Law School. One of them suggested I call him. I was not happy about having to discuss my failure with a member of the profession I wanted to enter but talking to him raised my spirits a bit. He gave me very useful advice about people in my Home State to contact who might know of job opportunities there. He also suggested that likely the reason I did not get into law school this year was because it was simply a particularly difficult year. Many more people applied and would likely accept admission because of the recession and this made it very challenging for more mediocre (my word, not his) candidates like myself. He also said that it was possible I could still be accepted because, at this time of year, a lot of candidates are sifting their various offers, declining or accepting offers, which may open up places for people to be taken off waitlists. Consequently, if candidates who are accepted to one school are offered a position at a better school, this opens up more places, which gives everyone still waiting a bit more of a chance. After talking to him I was more optimistic but still generally skeptical that anything would change.

Only two weeks later I got an email asking me if I was still interested in entering Midwest State School to study law and what was the likelihood that I would accept if given an offer. I said: 1.) Hell yeah I was still interested and 2.) The likelihood that I would accept was 100 f**king per cent. That was last Friday.

This Monday, I got the email that I had been accepted to study law at my first choice, Midwest Law School. So as it turns out, I’m going to be a lawyer after all!

Recap

I have not been writing on this blog because there is not much to report except a steady stream of rejections and, frankly, I'm embarrassed. At this point and for the foreseeable future, I am certainly common, but I am no law student. I think, however, that it might still be useful for me (and for you) to try to understand what has happened. I am trying to decide what is the best way to approach this project which will include, as I promised, full disclosure on the Oxbridge interviews. A good place to start is to take a short inventory of where I have applied and the outcomes. I am deeply disappointed in this list and embarrassed but I figure internet anonymity protects me to a large extent. Here is the list:

US Schools:

Midwest School (1st choice): Wait Listed

Northern School: Unsuccessful

Great Lakes School: Unsuccessful

UK Schools:

Cambridge: Unsuccessful

Oxford: Unsuccessful

King's College London: Unsuccessful

London School of Economics: Unsuccessful

University College London: Accepted

The executive summary is that I've been accepted to a UK school and wait listed at my first choice, but rejected everywhere else.

Going forward, my goals are: to describe the application process I went through both in the UK and the US; to discuss what happened after I submitted my applications; to discuss what has happened since I heard back from all the schools; and finally to describe what my goals are from here on out.